Sluicing, Right Dislocation, and Scopal Parallelism

Jun Abe*

* Former Professor, Tohoku Gakuin University

Abstract

The question I raise in this paper is why the Japanese counterpart of the sprouting type of sluicing does not appear to show island sensitivity. I argue that this apparent difference is attributed to another well-established one between these two languages: pro- drop vs. non-pro-drop languages. Thus, sluices are not real instances of the sprouting-type but rather of the merger type, which has an overt correlate in the antecedent clause, i.e., indefinite pro in relevant cases. As substantial evidence for this proposal, I demonstrate that indefinite pro actually functions as a correlate to a sluice in Japanese by examining how it behaves with respect to scopal parallelism. Given this, it is predicted that in Japanese sluicing examples, the implicit correlates that are identified as indefinite pro can take wide scope, unlike truly implicit correlates.